


as much in five minutes as in five years

by Emamel



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Magical Realism, Other, POV Outsider, Sentient Oxenfurt, Some post mountain scenes, mentioned relationships, no beta we die like renfri, technically not AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:15:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27918844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emamel/pseuds/Emamel
Summary: Oxenfurt knows every person that crosses its borders - knows them as well as they know themselves, or better perhaps. The shape of the soul is no stranger to it, and it has hundreds of years of practice in reading them all. This boy who plays at being a man is no different, and it knows as soon as he sets foot on the cobbled streets, his steps light and his eyes full of the wonder of a child that has never before seen the city, that he may be happy here, but he will never settle.Maybe he will find a home, a permanent place where he can grow roots as his joints seize with age and his eyes lose their shine to be replaced with a reumy film, but Oxenfurt knows that it won’t be here, and it won’t be yet. His soul is in the shape of a wanderer, and he turns his face to the sky, to the buildings, to the next street. He won’t be content with his lot here, the city knows. For now, though, he is still young, and flush with the success of the Academy for which Oxenfurt is these days known.OrJaskier's early years, as seen by the city of Oxenfurt
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Jaskier | Dandelion & Oxenfurt
Comments: 33
Kudos: 137
Collections: The Witcher Quick Fic #01





	as much in five minutes as in five years

**Author's Note:**

> title from the quote 'one belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years' - Thomas Wolfe
> 
> edit - this is now no longer anon! So I can freely say how much I loved writing this, and how much I hated having to keep quiet about it for a week.
> 
> I don't think any warnings really apply apart from the general weirdness that would come from a sentient city that sees everything and has magic.  
> Oh, and mentions of Valdo Marx.

It doesn’t remember that it was ever anything other than a city, though it knows that it must have been. The scholars that walk its streets speak of the past - some as though they were there, though the city remembers their birth -  _ squalling and screaming and bloody as the walls pressed in and the darkness smothered a mother too pale and thin -  _ and some as though it is little more than an afterthought to them.

They speak of it, and so the city knows that before it was a city, it was a town, and before that it was a place to cross the river that it straddles, and before that it was the home of elves. It can feel the blood that seeps deep into the earth below its foundations, but the life and the magic of it is long dispersed. Perhaps it is elven, perhaps it is human, or dwarven, or halfling, but to the city it means nothing more than rich soil. Rich soil, and a history that its professors like to debate long into the night.

(Oxenfurt - from Old Redanian  _ furt  _ “ford”, ‘a shallow place where water can be crossed’, and “oxen” for the popularity of the trade route across the Pontar for farmers and their livestock -  _ Farran, O. (1102) A history of Oxenfurt town and surrounding lands, p. 1 _ ) 

The city hears them. Of course it does - it hears everything, knows everything that happens on its streets, and within its walls, and below its surface, deep into the sewers. It knows that now, for instance, there is a sickness sweeping the docks that has been brought by the creature that sleeps within the sewers. It knows that there is a witcher creeping through the tunnels, sword drawn and eyes blacker than the tar that is being painted on the docked ships. It knows that the students within the library haven’t slept for nearly thirty hours, and before morning will slink down to the back alley eight streets over to seek the help of a herbalist - though to stay awake, or to finally seek rest, it cannot say. It knows how many babes have been born here, how many have died here - of disease, of injury, of old age and of bad luck.

In the early days, it knew very little. Its consciousness then was… incomplete. Hazy, looking back on it. Little more than a collection of houses by the water, because humans like to settle near water, on a main trade route. But as the hamlet grew - became a village, a town, a city, a port, an academy - so too did its own awareness of itself.

And now it is  _ alive,  _ with veins of cobbles and blood of slick mud tramped over by thousands of feet until it runs free and easy. Lungs of windows thrown open to catch the wind and billowing sheets hung out to dry - eyes of glass and lanterns and candleflames, ears of echoes that ring around the narrow streets. Its voice is as distinctive as it is indecipherable, the constant swell of noise that it knows must accompany such a crush of people in so small a space. It is as alive as surely as any of its inhabitants, and it loves as surely as its inhabitants.

Over the years it has loved many of the people that live here, that pass through, that don’t stop on their way to their destination but leave their mark nonetheless.

But it has loved very few the way it loves Jaskier.

  
  
  


Oxenfurt knows every person that crosses its borders - knows them as well as they know themselves, or better perhaps. The shape of the soul is no stranger to it, and it has hundreds of years of practice in reading them all. This boy who plays at being a man is no different, and it knows as soon as he sets foot on the cobbled streets, his steps light and his eyes full of the wonder of a child that has never before seen the city, that he may be happy here, but he will never settle.

Maybe he will find a home, a permanent place where he can grow roots as his joints seize with age and his eyes lose their shine to be replaced with a reumy film, but Oxenfurt knows that it won’t be here, and it won’t be yet. His soul is in the shape of a wanderer, and he turns his face to the sky, to the buildings, to the next street. He won’t be content with his lot here, the city knows. For now, though, he is still young, and flush with the success of the Academy for which Oxenfurt is these days known. 

(T he  **University of Oxenfurt** (legally  **The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxenfurt** ) was founded in the year 1096 - though there is evidence of informal teaching as early as 947 - and is considered to be one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world -  _ Farran, O. (1102) A history of Oxenfurt town and surrounding lands, p.12 _ )

It would be easy for him to get lost in the winding streets, but he is confident as he makes his way through the crowd, a bag upon his back, and a couple of servants following with trunks. They’ve left the horses they arrived on in the stables at the edge of the city, and though they had asked for directions, they had quickly been forgotten in the excitement of the day. He is, Oxenfurt notes with all the amusement it is able, heading in completely the wrong direction, but he doesn’t seem to care.

Many like him have walked these streets - rich children of country estates, who are used to being the biggest fish in a very small pond. Rich children who stroll into the hallowed halls of the University, hands and faces soft, who have never been told no in their short lives. Some of them rise to the challenge - and some don’t; slink home with their tails between their legs and their hackles up as they rail against their professors and their lectures and their exams and classmates. They leave the city and most don’t come back, too ashamed deep in their hearts, and Oxenfurt isn’t sorry to see them go.

Somehow, it knows that this boy won’t be one of them. Though he walks with the same cocky swagger - ridiculous on someone still too deep in the throes of puberty to grow even the straggliest of beards - Oxenfurt knows the depths of his heart. It knows how deeply enamoured he already is with the salt air of the sea and the silt of the Pontar

( known by the elves as  _ Aevon y Pont ar Gwennelen _ (The River of Alabaster Bridges), it is one of the largest rivers in the Northern Kingdoms, and serves as a natural border between Redania and Temeria to the West, and Kaedwen and Aedirn to the East -  _ Farran, O. (1102) A history of Oxenfurt town and surrounding lands, p. 2 _ )

with the crooked buildings near the centre of the city where space is tight and houses are packed so close together that in places sunlight cannot reach the ground. How well he loves the shouts of merchants haggling, and the blast of heat from the blacksmiths’ shop that he peers curiously into with no regard for the flying sparks or shards of metal.

He’ll be a reckless one, Oxenfurt knows, and smoothes the cobbles beneath his feet when he refuses to watch where he is going, too busy staring open-mouthed at the prostitutes lounging on the balcony above. Already, it knows that it will be watching his progress; will be looking out for him as it sometimes does for those it finds itself particularly fond of. With some of its attention split, it watches the butcher on Crown Street chat with the tailor’s apprentice - the one that lives a half hour walk away but still goes there every week with the pretense that he can’t find decent wares anywhere closer - as they dance around one another; and listens to a lecture on astronomy; and feels the pound of feet as a crowd is lured into a dance across a bridge by a talented young flautist, and makes the sign towards the Academy dormitories just a little clearer and better kept as the boy approaches.

From there, he finds his way well enough - introduces himself to his fellows as Julian, and settles himself into the student quarters with a smile that hardly dims when his bed sags a little beneath his weight. The rooms are fine, in the city’s opinion - and it has many comparisons to draw from - but it also knows that it isn’t nearly to the standard that these children are accustomed to. Heirs and lords and ladies of fine breeding and fine families who have never spent a single night in discomfort - their complaints ring through the corridors as Julian begins to unpack his trunk and sends the servants on their way. They put up a token protest, but the city knows how little they wish to spend time coddling the son of their lord, and it doesn’t take much effort to persuade them to be on their way.

Oxenfurt doesn’t bother to watch them go - it knows the route they take, hears their conversation and feels it the moment they cross its boundary, but it doesn’t much care. Its attention is held by the residents it loves and the ones it hates - it cracks a wall in the house of a particularly foul-tempered leatherworker so that the damp and the cold seeps in, and it keeps a candle burning just a little longer than it should for an exhausted mother nursing her twin girls.

And it feels Julian begin to settle into the marrow of his city, and it knows that no matter how far he strays from it, there will always be a part of him that lingers, begging him to return.

  
  
  


Julian is a quick study of human nature, and he falls in love with the residents of Oxenfurt as effortlessly as the city itself does. As he grows into himself - the long limbs finally balanced by his height, his cracking voice smoothing into a lilting tenor that has his classmates sighing or seething with envy - so too does he grow into his romantic heart. Freely given, the city watches, first with delight and then with dismay as it is handed carelessly back, or stamped on, or examined as little more than a curiosity. It tries to warn him away from some of the people he takes a shine to, and a few times it even succeeds; for a while.

In the end, however, there is no teacher as stern and as well-renowned as experience; something Julian gains quickly as he flirts and loves and fucks his way around the Academy, and later the wider city.

Beneath the layers of cynicism he drags around to cloak himself from the hurt, though, Oxenfurt knows the warmth of him. Knows it in the quiet poems he writes, and then burns, and then writes again for no-one but himself. Knows it in the gentle way he smiles at a love that had scorned him not two weeks before; though when she turns, it twists and curdles into a sour thing that leaves a bad taste in the cellars and the food halls of the city. Knows it in his anger when another student steals his words and his melodies - songs that the city has heard him playing late into the night, too soft to be heard by anyone but it, and the louse that shared Julian’s bed. First the anger blazes hot, and he tears through his rooms, turning them upside down as though that will do anything to slow the tears that burn his eyes - and then it cools, turns hard as steel plunged from a forge into water. Oxenfurt’s anger, on the other hand, simmers and bubbles and then boils over, and the inhabitants of the city find themselves gripped in a wave of directionless fury that lasts until it realises it is hurting its people.

Valdo Marx finds himself unable to navigate a city he once knew every turn of - finds himself suddenly plagued by every rotten stench that comes with so many people living so close together, finds that every shop he arrives at is either empty or so full of customers that trying to buy anything at all becomes a hopeless task. He lingers just long enough to graduate the academy (no longer with the honours he had once thought a certainty) before fleeing as though a pack of barghests were after him.

Instead, the city contents itself with riling a visiting lord’s favoured hunting dog into chasing him a few streets and spooking his horse enough to throw him. Julian (Jaskier now, to all of his friends, and to the city of Oxenfurt) laughs himself sick as he watches them race past his window, though it does little to soften the cage he is building around himself.

Oxenfurt knows, then, that he won’t remain in the city much longer. For all of its people, all of its learning, and the corners it tucks out of sight, and the whispers it smothers, and the love that drips into the gutters with the rain, it is too small for Julian-now-Jaskier. He is well known within the Academy, and even amongst the people of the city, but it cannot offer him the adventure he craves so dearly. As it had known from the moment he set foot over its edge, his is a soul made to wander.

And so, it is with a smothering sadness and no regret that it lets him go just scant weeks later; with a pocketful of coins he had found on the streets as he meandered his way towards the gates, and a song on his lips. There are no words - barely even a tune - but still it can be heard whistling through the streets on an impossible breeze until winter and its storms come to bury it beneath pounding hail.

  
  
  


Jaskier doesn’t return to the city for almost five years, but his songs travel far and wide. They are sung gleefully in every drinking hole, every concert hall, are hummed absently to babes as they’re rocked to sleep, and muttered beneath the breath of guildsfolk focused on their craft. Oxenfurt  _ revels _ with it, and the city comes awake with music, thrilled by his successes and delighted by the tales they tell.

The songs it likes most, though, are the aching ballads of soldiers far from home - the poems that follow a hero doomed to wander a barren land, the rambling tales of those cursed and unable to set foot in the places they love. Although it knows that it isn’t enough for Jaskier - not truly, or at least not yet - there is something about them that still makes hope perfume the streets with flowers blooming out of season.

  
  
  


Except, when Jaskier does return - leaner and stronger and hungrier in a way the city can’t quite define - he returns with hands already cradling a lute seeped in elven magic, and a heart full to breaking with love for a witcher.

(- due to the secretive nature of these foul creations, there is little known about the mutations of the beast known as the ‘Witcher’ -  _ anonymous (circa 1187) A travel journal kept by a merchant company travelling between Temeria and Kaedwen, p.48 _

\- thought to be the offspring of sorcery and physical experimentation, they still keep the human shape they were born with, though there are few true similarities between the species -  _ Kovris, S. (1112) A treatise on the common beasts of the Northern Kingdoms and the classifying and identification thereof, p.156 _

\- a violent and vicious guild that follows no laws of man; but is nevertheless effective in their pursuit of death and riches with little regard for naught but their own selfish desires -  _ Perara, T. (1204) The necessity of crafts and guilds within modern society on the Continent, p. 72) _

The city recoils - a wind whips so suddenly through the streets that cloaks are ripped from throats, horses dance sideways and the wooden stalls of the market are set shaking. 

Witchers have passed through the city before - it thinks it may even recall the one that Jaskier longs for, that he sings for, that he will return to as soon as the roads clear and travel is safe once again. It remembers the pain that dogged the witcher's footsteps, remembers the blood that stained the wall for days, even after he'd left. Whether it was the witcher's fault or not doesn't matter to Oxenfurt; its memory is long and it is slow to forgive.

Should the witcher hurt Jaskier, it knows it will never forgive him - knows that should he ever come within sight of the gates, it will open the very ground beneath his feet, and let the blood of a witcher soak and mingle with the elves and men of old. It will seal the dirt back over him and bury him so deep that not even his name will be whispered by history. He will die alone and forgotten while Jaskier sings on, heart captured by some other muse.

Years have passed since Oxenfurt last saw him fall in and out of love the way other people draw breath in and out. Years have passed since it saw his heart torn in two. This witcher will tear him apart and leave him to pick up the pieces, but the city knows that his infatuation will be fleeting. Soon enough, he will return to his old self, and when Oxenfurt is once again too small a world for him, he will walk the roads of the Continent again with his head held high.

All it has to do is be patient.

  
  
  


The next winter, Jaskier stays again in the rooms afforded to guest lecturers by the Academy, and Oxenfurt sends birds to sweetly sing him awake each morning, too full of joy at his presence to contain itself. Enthusiastic is too small a word - for Jaskier as he teaches, for the students that listen with rapturous wonder, and for the city, who revels in his company.

He still chases after that witcher - still misses him like the trees miss the spring, always turning his face towards the Path he knows the witcher takes as though it is the sun and waiting for the moment he can blossom once again.

Quietly, secretively, the city fumes. There are strings of bad luck for the merchants on the docks as their moorings snap and their boats suddenly spring leaks - wagons lose wheels and the roads leading from the city flood in every direction, but still as soon as word reaches Oxenfurt that the snows on the northern roads have cleared, Jaskier sets out with barely more than a wave and a smile tossed over his shoulder like so many coins.

  
  
  


There are others that the city loves - of course there are. With so many people living and dying and working and playing and doing great deeds and terrible cruelties within its walls, how could there not be? For the rest of the year, Oxenfurt contents itself with the details of their lives; of the news they bring with them from neighbouring cities alongside their wares and their families come to visit.

But it still finds that the news it loves best is that of the bard Jaskier - of his fame and his songs and the courts he has played in. It listens to Essi Daven, who it knows Jaskier adores like no other, and so who it too adores in his absence. She sings, and she plays, and the sound is so beautiful that the city adjusts to let her music ring through the streets from the Academy courtyard where she sits with her skirts puddled around her legs and her hair hanging around her face. She sings songs that they wrote together, and songs that she wrote alone, and songs that tell of Jaskier’s travels with the witcher, and Oxenfurt loves them all. People stop their business to listen, heads tilted and hearts pounding. The city’s own heart pounds too, the Academy suddenly full of an energy and vitality that leaves the professors both delighted and confused beyond all measure. Coin flows thick and fast between the merchants, the sailors cheer and jeer and thank their sea gods with every fair wind that carries them from the harbour, and visitors passing through linger in the city a day more, a week more. The colours seem brighter, the shadows chased back into the darkest alleyways.

The city thrives, and the city waits, and the city watches and listens and loves.

  
  
  
  


Until, one year, Jaskier comes back early.

  
  
  
  


His steps are slow and heavy, his heart slower and heavier. Fountains spill over, barrels burst and the waters of the Pontar begin to rise as the city weeps for him, shedding the tears he bites back with every smile aimed at old friends and enemies alike. Melancholy hangs over Oxenfurt dense as any cloud of choking smoke, and just as impossible to escape. It sits within the lungs of the residents, and even those that leap aboard a ship or carriage carry the smell of it on their clothes and in their hair. And all the while, Jaskier sinks deeper within his own head, even as he jokes weakly with scholars and whores alike.

Between Essi and Priscilla and bottles upon bottles of mead, it still takes weeks before he’ll tell them just what it was that the witcher said - what he did.

( _ The story is this -) _

A forge burns hot enough to ruin the sword it holds; one of the minor bridges crossing the river crumbles as its foundations shake. The city is gripped by a cold and blinding rage that twists through the bones of every person within its walls, leaving them quick to anger, and quicker to come to blows. 

Jaskier, meanwhile, cannot muster anger towards the witcher anymore. He’d burnt through it as he made his way here - made his way  _ home _ \- so now all that is left is exhaustion and heartsickness, and it falls to Oxenfurt to rile up fury in his place. Songs of the witcher sound muffled and wrong, and inspire nothing but mutters until they eventually fall from favour. Rumours fly, and warp, and multiply, and are spread beyond the city’s bounds. Old books within the libraries that had been hidden for decades are suddenly unearthed; treatises on witchers, long since disproved, but scathing in their fear of the creatures. Young students, still too gripped by curiosity and the certainty that they will live forever to truly understand fear grow bold in their hatred of witchers. Their scorn spreads across a city, once vibrant and dazzling, and now consumed by anger and sorrow.

By the turn of the season, hardly any mages remain in the city - their chaos holds the anger of the city, rendering it unpredictable and (to those weaker or less experienced) too dangerous to risk using. Those that do stay are either arrogant or powerful enough that they can work their craft unaffected; but even so, there is something different in the spells they cast that leaves folk reluctant to seek their help. 

The balance of the city begins to falter, but it isn’t until Jaskier takes Priscilla up on her offer to travel together to Novigrad that the fury finally eases. As they depart, some of the brilliance finds its way back into Jaskier’s eyes, the creases around them deepening with mirth as he laughs his way out of the gates.

Oxenfurt thinks it is the only one that knows how his heart still thrums with hope that his witcher will find him somewhere out in the great wide world.

  
  
  
  


Before the witcher

(Geralt of Rivia, age unknown, witcher of the Wolf School, birthplace unknown, parentage unknown: notable monikors  _ The Butcher Of Blaviken; The White Wolf) _

sets foot through the gates, Oxenfurt knows he is coming. It recognises the footfalls, almost too light to feel down through the blood-fed earth - the lanterns on the guardhouse blaze brighter, the walls distort the sound of his steps until they should be impossible to ignore, but still the witcher passes unseen into the city, the child in his arms unmoving in her terror. The city knows, as they know, that they are being followed (hunted, chased) and that their best hope of safety lies within the city, and then a ship up the coast at dawn.

The city knows, as they know, that their best hope of safety lies with Jaskier.

Anger has not yet had time to fade into gentle resentment and resignation - not for Oxenfurt, at least - and had the witcher been alone, Oxenfurt would have left him to lose his way within winding streets until he collapsed from exhaustion. 

But the witcher is not alone, and the girl’s fear renders the lantern light a sickly yellow that barely extends beyond the glass. Chaos - wild, primal, older than the city, as old as the blood in its foundations - ripples from her and twists the city’s own magic into something unrecognisable. The combination of their magic - one born from the souls of people, and one older than the Continent itself - calls out, a song that goes unheard by all but one, who stumbles from a tavern with wine and perfume clinging to his shirt, a dazed look in his eye.

Jaskier may not be a child of the city in truth - his feet still ache and itch for the road, and though he has friends here, his own rooms, his own class, no part of him feels settled - but he knows the shape of it better than any other. And, more than that, Oxenfurt  _ loves _ him, would never let him take a wrong turn. It leads him to the witcher along streets that are a little brighter, paths that are a little smoother; when he catches sight of the pair, he falls to his knees, and if the city loved him a little less, would have been soaked through his breeches in filthy water.

Oxenfurt hates that it can’t ignore how the witcher slumps, his heart pounding as the breeze lifts Jaskier’s scent to him.

“Shit,” Jaskier says, staggering to his feet and brushing at himself ineffectually. “You’re - here.”

The men that have been following the witcher and the child find the portcullis closed, and the gates unmanned, though the city knows it won’t slow them long. There are many ways past its walls, for those that know how to look.

“Please,” the witcher says. The child shifts in his arms, and her hood slips back over her ashen hair - Jaskier startles, as though he hadn’t noticed her. “They’re coming for her. Jaskier, please, I didn’t know where else to go.”

Briefly - less than a breath, less than a heartbeat, less than a thought to the city - Jaskier thinks of the witch he sometimes sings of. Gooseberries, freshly picked and ready for the Academy’s faculty the next morning, turn sour; lilacs in window boxes wilt, ruining a local herbalist’s crop. And then the city and Jaskier settle together, the old jealousy a remembered hurt that has been blunted by time and distance.

Jaskier nods.

“This way,” he says, beckoning them forward. The girl clings tighter to the witcher’s hair, tugging strands free, and though it sends pain sparking across his scalp, the witcher neither flinches, nor makes a sound.

On the outskirts, the men trying to find their way in through the sewer system find themselves face-to-face with a pack of drowners.

Oxenfurt thinks that the witcher would like the city, had the circumstances of their meeting been different. There are any number of treatises and compendiums on witchers within the Academy library - most old, and fallen from public favour following the popularity of Jaskier’s cycles - and the city has played host to witchers before, but never has it taken the time to study them for itself the way it does now. He would enjoy the anonymity that its streets can provide, it thinks, and Oxenfurt has always attracted freethinkers from all across the Continent. If there is any city in the world that will be kind to a witcher, it is this one.

And though it tries - tries so  _ hard _ \- to hate Geralt of Rivia for all he has done, it can still see how it was so easy for Jaskier to lose his heart to him.

The shadows on the street stretch wider to envelope the strange procession, their steps muffled into non-existence. A stone falls from the aqueduct leading into the city, sending a man plummeting to his death. The witcher scents the air, and follows the trail laid out for them by the city, a few paces behind Jaskier.

Jaskier slips between the buildings on feet as sure as when he is stone-cold sober, the shock of adrenaline clearing his vision and leaving only the faintest tremor in his hands. Geralt sets the girl on her feet and takes hold of her hand, squeezing tight at every breath that stutters with panic. They follow Jaskier single-file through a gap that should be too narrow to accommodate anything larger than a cat; a favourite shortcut of Jaskier’s since his days as a student. Oxenfurt turns a pair of drunkards away with an overturned cart and a whispered voice on the wind - they pale, mutter about ghosts, and take off in the other direction.

Two men manage to lever a gate open and hurry through, though the rest find it too heavy to even budge. They begin to make their way down streets too dark for even a witcher to see that twist back on themselves and lead only to dead ends.

Though he doesn’t often show it, Jaskier has a canny mind, well suited to subterfuge. He understands the instinct of self-preservation, and more than that, he understands the way the mind works. He knows the places Geralt would be likely to take the child, and knows the places the men following them will be likely to start their search.

He leads them to a brothel, sign lit by the red-glass lanterns, and ushers them around the side of the building. There is a ladder already lowered from an empty balcony, and Jaskier climbs it first, followed by the child, and finally, the witcher. The room, too, is empty, and Jaskier waves them towards the adjacent washroom with a murmur that he’ll find the madame of the house - an old friend from his university days - and make sure that they’re left in peace.

Geralt catches his arm before he reaches the door, and the window slams furiously shut, startling enough that he lets go.

Just inside the city wall, a man startles a dozing stallion, and the kick breaks his femur clean in two.

“Jaskier,” the witcher says, voice low and urgent. He glances towards the child with wide, yellow eyes.

A man finds himself locked in a cellar he could have sworn he had just seen a cloaked figure creep into.

“Are you sure we’ll be safe here? That she’ll let us stay? Will anyone -”

Jaskier smiles and cups the witcher’s cheek, and Oxenfurt sees how he softens into the touch, shoulders loosening and head tilting to press into the cradle of Jaskier’s hands. The fire in the grate burns low, intimate and warm; the bed and blankets are the softest in the city.

A man inhales the putrid air of an alchemist’s laboratory, and collapses to his knees, clutching at his chest.

“Don’t worry about that,” Jaskier says, his smile stretching wider as Geralt steps close enough to feel the heat of him. 

A man follows a trail, follows a trail, follows a trail, until he is sure he is going mad.

The child warms her hands by the fire, and watches the pair from the corner of her eye. She knows more than she lets on, Oxenfurt thinks, but it finds that it can’t read her the way it would normally. Her chaos is a strange thing, that it can only just feel the outline of.

“I know what I’m doing here - where to go, who to go  _ to.  _ This is my city, Geralt - I’ll keep you safe.”


End file.
